It has been a long time since I posted. Years, in fact. I just haven't been listening to much rock music. Mostly old time country. But lately, I've been listening to 20th Century classical music.
I've been reading the book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century by Alex Ross, trying to get a better handle on the century that produced Schoenberg, Bartok, John Cage, and Philip Glass. I'm only a about a fourth into the book after a month of reading, because when you read a book about music you spend a lot of time listening to what you're reading about.
I recently read a section about Charles Ives, an early 20th century American composer who worked at an insurance company by day and composed by night. He was an outsider in the American scene, but he was greatly admired in Europe. He composed using tonal and atonal techniques that predate their use in Europe, but no one really knew about it because he was so isolated. He was "modern" before the rest of the world know what "modern" was.
The piece that struck me the most were three tone poems called
Three Places in New England. Read the
Wikipedia entry to learn more about each piece. But if you choose to listen, you'll hear dissonant, haunting, disturbing, and beautiful music that will, if you're like me, stick with you for days. It's famous for it's use of quoting folk songs, spirituals, and patriotic melodies. The third piece, meant to evoke a river in Massachusetts, is a sung folk-sounding melody backed by a swirling, atonal dissonance of strings that curl around your ears like wisps of fog.
This soundtrack is mostly Alexi Murdoch songs, and if you have Alexi Murdoch's Time Without Consequence album, then you have most of these songs. But there are a few new ones...though I'm not sure if they're available elsewhere, and there's also a smattering of other artists.
A great album by a great Icelandic band. Released 21.08.2009 with songs about fish and breast milk–how can a person go wrong? You should listen to this album... or maybe you're, in fact, listening to it at this very moment and you don't even know it. Yes, it is that good. They put on a fantastic show at The Walker in late October. Mind you, I'm a bit biased. I once drove from Minneapolis to Lawrence, Kansas to see them play... Happy New Year, enjoy!
I found 2009 to be a very disappointing year in music. I've been enjoying the end of the year lists and podcast, but continue to be less then impressed. So, I am going to declare The Rural Alberta Advantage's (RAA)debut "Hometowns" the best record of 2009.
aka "Mike Doughty Rediscovers the Cello." This album has Doughty going back to his roots. And I mean that in 2 ways....his Soul Coughing roots are being revisited in the form of out-of-tune string instruments popping up on a bunch of songs. And also, this album sounds much more like Skittish than it does like either of his two newer albums...meaning it's a lot of (but not exclusively) just him and a guitar, no band. Which, in the end, makes this much less of a pop album than his previous two were. I gotta admire the effort by Mike, and this "progression" mostly succeeds. A few songs are strange just for the sake of it, and it's at those moments the album unfortunately stumbles a bit. But it wouldn't be a Mike Doughty album without those "experiments", so I've learned to expect them, if not embrace them. At least there isn't a "More Bacon Than The Pan Can Handle" track this time. *shudders*
In honor of the baseball season coming to a close and the Cubs telling Milton Bradley wear to stick it, I bring you The Baseball Project. The side project of a side project, The Baseball Project brings together Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Linda Pitmon, and Steve Wynn. This album is for anyone who likes baseball history and/or the musical styling of bands like The Minus 5, REM, The Young Fresh Fellow among other 90s alternative college rock.